The Department of Energy indicated Monday it intends in the upcoming budget year to cut tens of millions of dollars from environmental remediation funding at some of its national laboratories.
As part of the continuing rollout of the Trump administration budget plan for fiscal 2020, the Energy Department released preliminary funding tables for its laboratories.
The tables cover defense environmental cleanup budget line items for the national laboratories and other Energy Department sites that contributed to the Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons drive. Defense environmental cleanup is the largest line item for annual funding at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
For the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, the Trump administration is proposing $5.5 billion for defense environmental cleanup – down from $6 billion enacted by Congress for this year. That is in line with the broader proposal to shrink spending at the nuclear cleanup office from $7.2 billion now to just under $6.5 billion in fiscal 2020.
The reductions are reflected at the labs, though not uniformly.
- Defense environmental cleanup funding at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would drop from $220 million in 2018 and 2019 to $195.5 million in 2020, if the proposal passes muster on Capitol Hill.
- Just to the north, the Sandia National Laboratories would take home nearly $2.7 million, a moderate step up from an even $2 million in the last couple years.
- At the Idaho National Laboratory, defense environmental cleanup funding would be slashed by nearly $100 million, from the current $433.2 million to $334.9 million. The facility would also get an additional $13 million in non-defense cleanup money – up from $12 million in 2018 and $10 million in fiscal 2019 – bringing its cleanup funds to almost $348 million.
- The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee would see a similar-sized reduction in its defense environmental account – from $206.3 million now to $106.8 million.
- Conversely, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California would get a $103 million raise, from the current $26.7 million to a planned $129.7 million. Nearly all of that — $128 million – would be for decontamination and decommissioning of excess facilities.
